Wicked And Wilde: Immortal Vegas, Book 4 (12 page)

“Perhaps. Or perhaps you will see that which you most want to believe to be true, as well as what is true, as well as what is patently false. All three might appear at once, each a reasonable choice. With discernment, you can determine what is real and what is your imagining.”

The seed blossomed into a fully formed dreadfruit tree. “I’m a little weak in the discernment department, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

“You must remain true not merely to your course, but to logic, not wishful thinking. You will appear to have the ability to right past wrongs, seek forgiveness, speak to those long since passed. Despite your every inclination, you must resist these temptations. They will tie you to the world of illusions, and not to reality.”

“Stop me if you’ve heard this one already.” Nikki humphed a short breath and folded her arms over her chest. “The road to Hell is paved with good intentions. It’s a frickin’ Candy Land of clichés.”

“Clichés are such for a reason.” Kreios nodded.

“Got it,” I said, with a confidence I didn’t feel. “Anything else?”

“Don’t stay long. Over the past fifteen hours while we’ve been traveling, your Detective Rooks has been receiving word of additional drug incursions in Las Vegas, some of which are tied to Annika Soo.”

“Gamon again.” My stomach twisted as I remembered the long, sinuous tattoo etched into Soo’s and Rutya’s arms. “He’s luring her there as much as he was trying to pin me down. You have to warn her.”

At his blank stare, I bristled. “It’s not interfering, Kreios. It’s simple human compassion.”

His smile was silky. “And yet, I am not quite human, am I, Sara Wilde?”

I blinked at his words. I’d…heard those words, somewhere before. Somewhere recent. Somewhere important.

“I’ll do it.” Nikki held out her hand. “Give me your phone. Someone in her operation will take your call, and I’ll tell her to stay put in Shanghai.” She hesitated and shot Kreios a questioning glance. “I assume Siri doesn’t work in Hell, right?”

“Nothing electronic will pass through, no. Armaeus attempted to take modern tools with him, as well as those crafted in ancient times. He reported to Eshe that anything crafted later than the time of Christ stayed behind. He nodded to me. “Your jewelry should remain intact, your clothing. Not your gun.”

I nodded. I’d suspected as much when we’d left our weapons locked in the hotel safe. “What about my cards?”

“Not as such, but I thought about that.” He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a long necklace with a silver-and-gold-embroidered pouch at its end, about the size of a credit card. He weighed the pouch in his hand, then tossed it to me. “This contains seventy-two chips, each with the imprint of a card. The entire effect, however, is that of a necklace. It should work.”

“It better.” The pouch necklace was curiously light, and I slung it around my neck, tucking it under my tank top. It hung lower than the pendant Soo had given me, but the two necklaces felt curiously right together. After giving up my phone and my more standard Tarot deck—but not my key—I moved down the long walls, surprised that none of the titles of the books were in English, and then ashamed that I was surprised. But, seriously, Armaeus couldn’t find an entry point into Hell stateside? There had to be multiple options. Why here?

I lifted a hand to drift along the tomes, stopping shy of touching them. They were gorgeous, in the main, richly preserved and thick, redolent of leather and spice. There was an entire section devoted to maps, and I smiled to think of how many times man’s understanding of the world had changed, carefully written down to preserve what little we knew at any given time. The next section was equally easy to decipher but had me slowing down. I glanced to see Nikki and Kreios deep in conversation over one of the globes, then shifted my gaze back.

These were bibles. Thick, thin, enormous, and pocket-sized, the library held a veritable treasury of bibles from almost every tongue—including English. I pulled out a small volume and tensed, but the gates of Hell didn’t swing open in front of me. There wasn’t so much as a charcoal-singed breeze. Instead, I flipped the book over in my hand—

“Gloves, please.”

I nearly jumped out of my skin at the little man who appeared at my side, hunched over but thick torsoed, with long arms and meaty paws. He held up a pair of cheap white cotton gloves.

“What?”

“Gloves. For the books.” He waved the gloves at me, and I took them, noting that he had gloved hands as well. He held out his hand for the bible and waited for me to pull on the gloves before handing it back. He nodded his thanks and retreated, heading for the Devil and Nikki. He seemed a decent enough docent, and I glanced down to the sacred book.

It felt odd to hold a bible with gloved hands, but I opened it and leafed through its gilt-edged pages, realizing that I was holding a Gutenberg edition. It was a little awe-inspiring to imagine this being mass-produced at the dawn of the age of the printing press—solely for the purpose of spreading knowledge of the Christian faith far and wide.

I replaced it in the shelves and pulled a second, then a third, but there was nary a hint of fiery inferno lurking behind the wall. I frowned and glanced around, the gloves suddenly too tight on my hands. I worked off the left and held it, scanning the room for the librarian watchdog. He was nowhere to be seen, so I tucked the glove into my hoodie pocket. Nikki and Kreios were at the far end of the chamber. I crossed the open space to the nearest globe.

It was small and golden, nestled in a carved wooden base, with whisper-thin indents of the countries and oceans apparent on its surface. It looked more like a lawn ornament than a globe, so I moved to the next, and the next after that, gradually working my way back toward Nikki and Kreios. At length, Nikki noticed me and grinned.

“Great, huh?” She lifted her hands, and I could see the white gloves. “Old guy about had a fit trying to get the first pair on until he had to give up and go for larger. I think he was afraid of hurting my feelings.”

I smiled. “Find anything?”

“Nope,” she said as I drifted my gloved fingers along the globe in front of me. This one was richly detailed. Its marker said it had been created in the twelfth century—when the earth remained a wild and untrammeled place. This was the world that existed when Armaeus was first mortal, I realized, and I rolled the globe back and forth, tracking the path between France and Egypt. How long must it have taken to travel back then, I wondered, and what would you have seen along the way?

A zip of electricity sparked beneath my gloved fingers, and I quieted my hand, my finger pads resting on a land mass in the Middle East. This was centuries before anything like the modern state of Israel had come into being, yet that was the location, roughly, beneath my hand. “Sheol,” the girl Rutya had said, using the Hebrew word commonly associated with Hell. Had that been some kind of clue?

There was no denying the energy beneath my fingertips, that much was certain. Maybe there was a keyhole in this globe?

I slipped off the other glove and shoved it also into my hoodie pocket, again checking for the docent. He was apparently off dusting a bookshelf. I pulled out the baroque ornamental key.

“Hey, guys.” I waved the key over the globe as Nikki turned toward me. The energy of the globe felt warm and inviting, lifting up toward me with the slightest frisson of attachment. “I think I found something here.”

My hand jerked downward with a sickening lurch. The key smacked into the globe—

And I was lost.

Chapter Ten

I sprawled forward, arms windmilling, crashing to the floor of a chamber not dissimilar to the one I’d just left, but much, much darker. Fires burned in grates at either end of the space, casting shadows as well as light. Huge statues surrounded me, crafted with the same beautiful baroque artistry of the Clementinum Library, but the effect was of creatures looming over me from every direction.

I turned around, taking an experimental breath.

Yep, Hell had oxygen. Already things were looking up.

The key was gone—not on my person, not anywhere around me. Dusting myself off, I got to my feet, then walked carefully down the middle of the chamber, giving the statues a wide berth. The fire at the far end seemed realistic enough, but I noticed it gave off no heat. Despite the whole brimstone atmosphere about the place, the temperature was moderately cool, about what you’d experience in any suburban house that didn’t crank the A/C. Also a bonus.

As soon as I got close enough to the flames to see by the light, I took inventory. The key was still missing. Soo’s amulet and the pouch of chips remained around my throat, however, ditto my clothes and shoes. Everything a girl could need. I tilted my head, listening for water, but there was no sound of a rushing river anywhere close. The dark mages would have to wait. My first responsibility was to Soo—and then to find Armaeus, if I could. That dream of him watching and rewatching ancient history of the Arcana Council…that seemed dangerously close to the Spinners’ and Kreios’s warnings. I had to make sure the Magician wasn’t getting wrapped up in the spells this place was casting.

Part of that was because he was needed by the Council, certainly. But part of it was because I needed him too. Over the past year, the Magician had worked his way past more than my mental barriers, he’d gained a foothold in my heart. He didn’t know it—couldn’t know it, or I’d never hear the end of his smug I-told-you-sos. But Armaeus’s smugness I could handle. It was his absence from my mind that I was finding increasingly difficult to bear.

“Focus,” I muttered. The Magician wasn’t my primary purpose in Hell. Not yet. Soo was.

Bypassing the pouch of chips for now, I slipped my fingers around the jade amulet. It was warm to the touch, and I could feel the crackle of electricity off it. I swung left, then right, and it grew distinctly warmer with the second option. So right it was.

I frowned as I stepped carefully forward into the shadows that stretched along the room. There was a doorway here, but the room beyond was equally dark. I hadn’t thought to bring a torch, and cast a glance toward the enormous fire. There were several long sticks in a bucket by the blaze, but as I stepped toward them, I hesitated. This baroque wonderland had been
exactly
what I was expecting, down to the creepy statues. What if I expected something different out of the next room than a dank and cheerless hole?

A sudden brightness to my right made me jerk around, but there was nothing there…other than tiny flames suddenly dancing in the sconces of the next room. I realized that I was standing in some sort of interior courtyard dotted with columns and sporting walls riddled with window-like holes.

As I watched, the rooms all around the center chamber lit up with sconces in a rush of light, brightening the entire space. Staircases arched into shadows, promising yet more discoveries in every direction. I glanced up and saw a lushly painted ceiling roiling with stars and angels and clouds—far, far above me, too high to ever reach.

Heaven.

I started moving.

The room immediately next to the fire-hearth courtyard was another enormous chamber, this one covered floor-to-ceiling with paintings I didn’t recognize, but that I probably should—works of art reminiscent of every major artist known to man. Had those masters spent time in this place, suffering in purgatory before ascending to heaven or simply finding their final rest? Or was this all a figment of what I expected Hell to look like? I reached out a tentative hand and tapped the edge of a gilt frame. It stayed firm.

There was no way to know how real an illusion might be, of course. Kreios had gone on and on about keeping true to my path, and I began to get a tiny sense of his concern. I could spend hours studying these works of art, drowning myself in them, completely forgetting why I’d come here in the first place.

I was on the clock, though. So that couldn’t happen.

Resolutely, I stepped back from the paintings and kept moving, gripping the amulet tightly. As I neared the far door, a sudden bolt of fire shot through my hand, and I dropped the amulet against my neck, wincing as it seared my skin.

“Ouch ouch ouch!” I scrambled to remove the thing, playing hot potato until I was able to hold it by its string. The amulet swayed, fairly smoking, and I scowled over it to the room beyond. “I get it, I get it, we’re closer,” I muttered. “Take it easy.”

As I made my way through the palace of stone chambers, however, I noticed something else peculiar. There was absolutely no sound in this place. No screams of the righteous or howls of the damned, no cries of lamentation or passion. There wasn’t even a mouse scurrying around down here, and the silence closed in on me. Resolutely I kept walking, the heat of the amulet growing stronger and the rooms becoming smaller and more sumptuous with each new corridor I breached. Finally I reached one that had the amulet practically sizzling with excitement, but which made me slow my steps. I held the amulet by its strings again, ignoring its urgent, flaring heat.

I’d…seen this place before, I thought.

But that was impossible. I would have remembered it if I’d ever stumbled into a hallway like this. So, a dream? A nightmare? A late-night horror flick?

Something.

Ahead of me, a long corridor stretched with a sort of altar at the far end. Something large, stone, and green sat on top of a marble base that rested on that altar. It could have been a chipmunk, or a scarab, or a blob of fossilized Play-Doh. I couldn’t tell from this distance.

Rooms opened off to either side of the corridor, and I stepped uneasily down the path, Soo’s amulet hot enough to roast marshmallows. I swung it in front of me, hoping I wouldn’t have to put it on again anytime soon. I didn’t need an imprint of Soo’s ancestral dragon burned into my chest.

Halfway down the corridor, I realized what the thing on the altar was—a frog. A jade frog, almost identical to one I’d handled over a year and a half earlier, in the dirty streets of Rio de Janeiro. What did that job have to do with this one—or was my mind simply conjuring up connections to give me any sort of context?